X-ray tech?
The expensive technology deployed on Janice S. was a bigger factor in her bill than the lab tests. An “NM MYO REST/SPEC EJCT MOT MUL” was billed at $7,997.54. That’s a stress test using a radioactive dye that is tracked by an X-ray computed tomography, or CT, scan. Medicare would have paid Stamford $554 for that test.
Janice S. was charged an additional $872.44 just for the dye used in the test. The regular stress test patients are more familiar with, in which arteries are monitored electronically with an electrocardiograph, would have cost far less — $1,200 even at the hospital’s chargemaster price. (Medicare would have paid $96 for it.) And although many doctors view the version using the CT scan as more thorough, others consider it unnecessary in most cases.
According to Jack Lewin, a cardiologist and former CEO of the American College of Cardiology, “It depends on the patient, of course, but in most cases you would start with a standard stress test. We are doing too many of these nuclear tests. It is not being used appropriately … Sometimes a cardiogram is enough, and you don’t even need the simpler test. But it usually makes sense to give the patient the simpler one first and then use nuclear for a closer look if there seem to be problems.”
We don’t know the particulars of Janice S.’s condition, so we cannot know why the doctors who treated her ordered the more expensive test. But the incentives are clear. On the basis of market prices, Stamford probably paid about $250,000 for the CT equipment in its operating room. It costs little to operate, so the more it can be used and billed, the quicker the hospital recovers its costs and begins profiting from its purchase. In addition, the cardiologist in the emergency room gave Janice S. a separate bill for $600 to read the test results on top of the $342 he charged for examining her.
According to a McKinsey study of the medical marketplace, a typical piece of equipment will pay for itself in one year if it carries out just 10 to 15 procedures a day. That’s a terrific return on capital equipment that has an expected life span of seven to 10 years. And it means that after a year, every scan ordered by a doctor in the Stamford Hospital emergency room would mean pure profit, less maintenance costs, for the hospital. Plus an extra fee for the doctor.
Another McKinsey report found that health care providers in the U.S. conduct far more CT tests per capita than those in any other country — 71% more than in Germany, for example, where the government-run health care system offers none of those incentives for overtesting. We also pay a lot more for each test, even when it’s Medicare doing the paying. Medicare reimburses hospitals and clinics an average of four times as much as Germany does for CT scans, according to the data gathered by McKinsey.
Medicare’s reimbursement formulas for these tests are regulated by Congress. So too are restrictions on what Medicare can do to limit the use of CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans when they might not be medically necessary. Standing at the ready to make sure Congress keeps Medicare at bay is, among other groups, the American College of Radiology, which on Nov. 14 ran a full-page ad in the Capitol Hill–centric newspaper Politico urging Congress to pass the Diagnostic Imaging Services Access Protection Act. It’s a bill that would block efforts by Medicare to discourage doctors from ordering multiple CT scans on the same patient by paying them less per test to read multiple tests of the same patient. (In fact, six of Politico’s 12 pages of ads that day were bought by medical interests urging Congress to spend or not cut back on one of their products.)
The costs associated with high-tech tests are likely to accelerate. McKinsey found that the more CT and MRI scanners are out there, the more doctors use them. In 1997 there were fewer than 3,000 machines available, and they completed an average of 3,800 scans per year. By 2006 there were more than 10,000 in use, and they completed an average of 6,100 per year. According to a study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, the use of CT scans in America’s emergency rooms “has more than quadrupled in recent decades.” As one former emergency-room doctor puts it, “Giving out CT scans like candy in the ER is the equivalent of putting a 90-year-old grandmother through a pat-down at the airport: Hey, you never know.”
Selling this equipment to hospitals — which has become a key profit center for industrial conglomerates like General Electric and Siemens — is one of the U.S. economy’s bright spots. I recently subscribed to an online headhunter’s listings for medical-equipment salesmen and quickly found an opening in Connecticut that would pay a salary of $85,000 and sales commissions of up to $95,000 more, plus a car allowance. The only requirement was that applicants have “at least one year of experience selling some form of capital equipment.”
In all, on the day I signed up for that jobs website, it carried 186 listings for medical-equipment salespeople just in Connecticut.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/#ixzz2LxZtKGlC
“life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes” -shands
If you were to produce a documentary film, it would be about….
The realities of poverty in America, the working poor. However, I would intentionally make it for a Republican audience in mind so they would finally ‘get it’ and stop thinking they are of a superior race because they were born with money and all the means to continue to be rich by sapping money from everyone around them. Perhaps edging on Buddhist philosophy to suggest planet preservation is best for EVERYONE. Or tapping into the wealthy’s fear of there not being anyone left to enslave when the poor are all too hungry and sick to work for pennies.
‘We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,’ he said. ‘Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.’
— Nick Hanauer
